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David Brock University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service March 25, 2014

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David Brock University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service March 25, 2014 David Brock University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service March 25, 2014 Thank you Chris for that generous introduction, you’ve clearly got a great future in public service and if I can ever be helpful with that please let me know. I also want to thank Nikolai DiPippa for running a great speaker series here at the school. And Skip, our paths crossed once upon a time, although we’ve never met. I’m happier to be meeting you under these circumstances than in the bad old days. It’s an honor to be here and to be part of the fantastic program you run here at the school. I would also like to thank the Clinton School of Public Service for inviting me here today. And most importantly I want to thank all of you folks in the audience for coming out today…in what I hope will be an informative and enlightening conversation about the right- wing’s twenty-year obsession with the Clintons and how in their zeal to try and destroy an American President… conservatives up-ended many of our long-held cultural values, and have fundamentally reshaped how we all engage and experience politics – and life – in today’s America. I’ll also suggest how we might come together to change these dynamics, and if we don’t, how history may repeat itself once again. Finally I want to ask your forbearance a bit at the beginning as I tell a personal story. It’s my story, a cautionary tale, but I hope for all of you here who plan to make a career in public service, to actually make a difference, you’ll find something meaningful in it. It’s great to be back in Little Rock, in what I have to say are very different circumstances than when I was here last. For starters, if you told me 22 years ago that there’d be a Clinton School of Public Service located on President Clinton Ave., just down the street from the William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Library, I would have had a stroke. Back then I was still in my 20s staying just down the street at the Capitol Hotel, drinking at the bar – plotting a campaign of dirty tricks – all in the service of one goal: to make sure that Bill and Hillary Clinton would never make it to the White House. Seriously, that’s the guy I was back then. I was part of what Hillary Clinton would later call “the vast right-wing conspiracy.” When Mrs. Clinton made that remark about the political opposition in the late 1990s, insiders scoffed. But she was right. The people I was working with then -- they were after the Clintons. We were. I was. Despite our best efforts, the American people didn’t buy what we were selling, and they sent the Clintons to Washington. And in a democracy like ours, that should have been the end of it. But this time something was different. The conservative powers-that-be wouldn’t accept the legitimacy of the victory by a young, dynamic, progressive couple who threatened the established political and social order. They were serious agents of change. So the conservatives defied 200 years of American history and set the stage for a coup. The conservative magazine where I worked, The American Spectator, started “The Arkansas Project,” a dirt-digging operation into the Clinton’s past that eventually encompassed a kitchen sink full of preposterous allegations, from financial fraud, to drug- running, and even murder. As the tall tales rolled in, The Spectator disguised them as investigative journalism and fooled people into taking them seriously. The Spectator’s primary benefactor, billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, heir to a banking fortune, understood something that others didn’t: That if you were going to hijack democracy and destroy a Presidency, you needed a lot of money. Long before the advent of SuperPACs allowed big money to dominate politics, he was willing to shell out millions to propagandize the nation and wreck the Clintons. At the time, of course, all this was way above my pay grade. My job was to get a good story. And I soon thought I had something that would please the boss. I was tipped that Arkansas state troopers who had served on then-Governor Clinton’s security staff wanted to go public with stories scandalizing Bill and Hillary Clinton. As a young reporter on the make, I jumped on the next plane, heading here to Little Rock. I learned more than I bargained for. Getting to know the troopers and their handlers exposed me for the first time to the reality of Clinton-hating, which I could see had its origins in Arkansas among racists who resented Bill Clinton’s early embrace of civil rights. The anti-Clinton animus deepened when Hillary Rodham, an accomplished professional woman, came on the scene. As you can imagine, I quickly became suspicious of the troopers’ motives in speaking out. To make matters worse, there was no way to tell if what they were saying was true or not. But I knew I was expected to deliver. I took them at their word and printed it all anyway. What I wrote became national news, and the ensuing scandal was dubbed “Troopergate.” One of the goals, turning the mainstream media against the Clintons, was beginning to work. The troopers took their stories straight to CNN and The Los Angeles Times. The press now had license to chase all sorts of news, even news that was not fit to print. You see, the conspiracy to upend the Clinton Presidency could only work if the mainstream went along. The New York Times was already on to the story of Whitewater – an old land deal in which the Clintons lost money – that set off a partisan special prosecutor investigation led by Ken Starr. In the end, it would prove nothing but the Clintons’ innocence. Few seemed to notice that under scrutiny almost none of the troopers’ stories turned out to be true. But I noticed. I later learned something else that I found particularly disturbing and that warrants special emphasis. A political partisan close to would-be House Speaker Newt Gingrich had paid off the troopers to talk – a revelation that exposed the whole experience as a set-up, a sham, a fraud on the public. I’d become a conservative back in college because I was attracted to the ideals of Ronald Reagan. I’d wanted to make a positive impact with my journalistic advocacy. Now, legitimate ideological and intellectual opposition to liberalism was giving way to destroying people for partisan gain, with the ends justifying any means. And somehow, despite growing hesitation, I found myself leading the charge. After the trooper story broke, a book publisher commissioned me to write a political hit-job on Hillary Clinton, to be published on the eve of the 1996 elections. The hope was it would be the silver bullet that would finally stop the Clintons. So I spent two years researching and writing, retracing every step in Hillary Clinton’s life, doing more than a hundred interviews, and collecting virtually every piece of paper that had Mrs. Clinton’s name on it going back 20 years. What I found, I knew my audience didn’t want to hear. As I did my reporting, I came to see what Hillary Clinton’s admirers saw in her, what we all see in her today – a steadfast commitment to public service and a deep desire to affirm the good and virtuous in politics all too rarely seen in her generation of politicians. So I had a choice. Twist the facts to give the conservatives what they wanted. Or, stick to the facts, and reclaim my integrity. Which actually was no choice at all. The Right, meanwhile, doubled down in their war on the Clintons. Having lost the enemy they needed to win elections when the Soviet Union collapsed and struggling to compete with Clinton’s positive agenda for the country, they had nothing but scandal politics to fall back on as the means to gaining power. Setting the tone of conservative politics for years to come, Newt Gingrich was radicalizing the party and demonizing all those with whom he disagreed. Gingrich would later pursue the impeachment of a president based on the same behavior in which he had been engaging. Little did anyone, least of all me, know that the lies of Troopergate would lead to years of politicized litigation against the President, further enmeshing him in the ever-overreaching Ken Starr investigation. The Republican Congress saw an opportunity to open an impeachment inquiry. At that moment, I decided to blow the whistle on what I knew about the wrongful scheme to thwart a twice-elected President by throwing sand in the gears of progressive governance. I apologized for my role in it. And I opposed impeachment as an unconstitutional power grab. At its root, I realized, Clinton-hating had nothing to do with what the Clintons did or did not do. It had everything to do with fear of the change they represented on the one hand -- and on the other a newly brutal form of partisan power politics. Those same reactionary forces are still at work today, abetted at times by the mainstream. “The Arkansas Project,” it turns out, was in some ways just a rough model of things to come. There used to be a respected intellectual conservative movement in this country that contributed to a healthy discourse. That movement has been gutted by assorted billionaires and shock-jocks who realized that they could use fear and sensationalism to undermine honest debate and buttress their bottom lines.
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